94 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 those who practice Eastern spiritual practices with perceptible cultural connections to Buddhism (such as Zen-Buddhism) and Taoism (such as qigong) among the interviewees. Formation of a sampling frame. The sampling frame was formed using the snowball sampling method, where one informant shares the contacts of acquaintances who practice Eastern spiritual practices, and they, in turn, share their contacts and so on. To determine the number of interviews we used the information saturation threshold criterion to determine the number of interviews. The number of interviews is sufficient when each subsequent interview fails to provide new knowledge on the study topic. We also considered recommendations from researchers who reconstructed the sample size in a phenomenological study. John Ward Creswell recommends five to twenty-five interviews, while Janice M. Morse suggests six interviews (Zubariev 2018, 147). Thus, we conducted twenty-nine narrative interviews (each lasting at least one hour) with individuals practicing Eastern spiritual practices in Kharkiv from 2012 to 2015, which was sufficient for building an empirical typology. Participants included representatives from organizations such as the Kharkiv Center of Indian School of Reiki, Maharaja Yoga Center, Kharkiv Organization Zhong Yuan Qigong, Qigong School of Mantak Chia, Patanjali International Yoga Foundation (Vajra Yoga Studio), Shantaram Yoga Studio, Shanti Yoga Studio, Vostok Studio, Kharkiv Society of Sahaja-Yoga, Kharkiv Diamond Way Buddhist Center within the Karma Kagyu lineage, Roman Dolya Center of Self-Cognition, Wuwei School of Psychology, Yoga School House of Sun, School of Kundalini Yoga (SOLAR Center), and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Data analysis. The data analysis involved two qualitatively different stages of working with the test material. Firstly, we performed primary text reading, where we singled out sequences according to the topical principle, applied the procedures of “thick description” (Denzin 1989, 83), and performed primary coding and classification (Wolcott 1994, 23–29). At this stage, we read transcripts of twenty-nine interviews and singled out text fragments in which informants described their transpersonal experiences. Another primary coding was applied to these fragments, and each fragment received one or several codes that disclosed the meaning assigned by the informants to their transpersonal experiences. Examples of codes included “self-understanding”, “feeling of happiness”, “euphoric state”, “confirmation of existence of energy”, “support in difficult moments”, “experience of another reality”, and so on. We then classified fragments that received similar codes accordingly, grouping them into categories such as “transpersonal experience and perception”. As a result of this stage, we identified and classified fragments of narrative interviews in which informants talked about their transpersonal experiences. In the second stage, we focused on defining the meanings that informants assigned to their transpersonal experiences. We asked ourselves what these experiences meant to the informants in the context of their lives. At this stage, we formulated a typology of meaningful contexts for interpreting transpersonal experiences by the representatives of Eastern spiritual practices. The study limitations. The study was carried out using qualitative methods of sociological research, namely the life history tactics. Unlike quantitative methods, which involve the generalization of data obtained by studying the common characteristics of the sample population, qualitative methods are aimed at studying the unique life experience. Thus, the analysis of twenty-nine narrative interviews with representatives of Eastern spiritual practices of the city of Kharkiv allowed to outline an empirical typology that is not universally significant and has cultural, social, religious and geographical limitations. We acknowledge that there are probably other meaningful contexts of interpretation of transpersonal experiences that have not been identified within this study. For example, one can assume that there are individuals who had transpersonal experiences with negative effects (despair, sadness, fear), and eventually abandoned spirituality. It should also be noted that we do not question the veracity of the interviewees’ accounts of transpersonal experiences and do not set out to prove or disprove the existence of the respondents’ experiences. Using the methodological technique of phenomenological reduction, we take this issue “out of the brackets” for this study. 4 Interpretation of Research Findings and Discussion We have identified the first ideal-typical model of understanding transpersonal experience, which includes meaningful contexts in which transpersonal experiences are interpreted by informants as arguments corroborating certain phenomena, processes, and reality. Several subcategories within the framework of this ideal-typical model can be identified, as transpersonal experience can be interpreted as: a) corroboration of the health-improving effect of “energy” on the physical body; b) evidence of the fact that psychological problems,
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